Free Republic

AUBURN - Mayor-elect Tim Lattimore and members of the Mayor's Social Justice Task Force agreed Tuesday that members of the volunteer group that looks into racism and related issues should itself be more diverse. Lattimore told members Tuesday he's concerned the task force is represented by individuals with a liberal viewpoint and that it had no conservative representation. The mayor-elect met with some of the group's 21 members Tuesday to talk about his feeling about the task force and his plans for it once he takes office Jan. 1. Lattimore said he's not against having the task force, but he...

Former Minnesota Rep. Tim Penny has long been an outspoken opponent of pork barrel spending because he says so many projects don't merit federal aid. In "Pig Tales," an article which Penny contributed to in the most recent edition of Reader's Digest, he held up Cayuga County's Merry-Go-Round Playhouse's receipt of $150,000 in discretionary funds from Rep. James Walsh to help pay for renovations as "Beltway Robbery." "One reason so many pork projects pass is that few people know about them," Penny wrote. "They're slipped into bills without debate or a committee vote. If Congress openly debated their merits, how...

I was listening to the radio when I heard a man speaking about airport security. He claimed that we were wasting a great deal of money and passengers' time with our current airport-screening procedures. He was fairly confident that, because of the present scrutiny, terrorists would no longer use airplanes as missiles. His position was that adequate security could be maintained through the use of profiling. I agreed with his point that terrorists are now looking elsewhere for places to strike against American interests, but the thought of profiling really concerns me. There seems to already be too much prejudice....